Childhood Maltreatment Associated with Suicide Attempts

A history of childhood maltreatment increases the risk that a person will attempt suicide. Different types of maltreatment, such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect, often overlap. In a 2015 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, researcher Nicolas Hoertel and colleagues used data from an epidemiological survey of 34,653 Americans to clarify the mechanism by which maltreatment is linked to suicide risk.

Hoertel and colleagues found that childhood maltreatment in general was associated with an increased risk of attempting suicide and an earlier age at first suicide attempt. The analysis controlled for demographic characteristics and psychiatric diagnoses. Most of the risk came from effects that were shared across all the types of maltreatment. However, sexual abuse directly conferred an additional risk of suicide attempt.

In an earlier study of 648 outpatients with bipolar disorder by this editor Robert Post and colleagues (led by Gabriele Leverich), 34% had a history of suicide attempts, and these participants had a higher incidence of traumatic stressors in childhood and more stresses at illness onset than those without a history of suicide attempts. A history of sexual abuse in childhood was also linked to an increased risk of a serious suicide attempt in the earlier study, which appeared in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 2003.

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